You might try dunking the ends of those wires in a solution of baking soda dissolved in really hot water. Be prepared for lots of fizzing and foam. Rinse and repeat until the reactions stop... then recrimp the terminals.
Can i connect wires on different sides of the same terminal?
- Thread starter The motor guy
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On the old wire?
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Just to clarify. I bought a whole kit with all new body grounds and both positive and negative wires. So far the only thing I've replaced is the one positive crossover cable that connects the two 12v batteries in parallel which I think fixed the issue of only charging one battery. Should I go ahead and install all the other wires too, or just wait until I have another issue?
If you already have new wires, then that would be the most foolproof way to get rid of any excessive resistance. I was just describing a way to try to rehabilitate your existing wires and terminals.
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I see. Yeah I giess ill just keep going and prevent future issues
I gave this thread a read and didn't see any mention of corrosion within the swag.
When you measured the resistance of the cable, was it connected up? Any current flow on it will throw off a resistance measurement--the circuit has to be good and truly dead. In this situation, while this wire should be a virtual dead short, and thus any small current through having a negligible amount of voltage, any developed voltage will throw off a meter. Worse as the resistance goes up.
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Nope. I had already already taken it off the truck. It was laying on the garage floor when testing the resistance. I got a solid 7 ohms with a nice poke into the terminal ends.
7 ohms is crazy high. Should have like .1 ohms on it. Like others have said, probably the connections. Clean them up as best you can.
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Thats why is was at 12.6 volts, not one bit of voltage was going through. It all went to the other battery. Luckily the starter connects to that particular battery that was getting 14v. Cleaning the terminals only worked for a couple months and im back to getting uneven voltage. Those terminals are worn out from collecting too much. Everytime you run the pipe cleaner thing on the posts, you're making them smaller in diameter and then they dont go as tight as they should.
On the battery terminals? yes, that can get smaller due to cleaning, then the battery clamp eventually won't get a good clamp onto it.
But I thought you had a problem with the terminals on the wire?
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I can't get bare copper without cutting that one big end off to see if it's a problem with the wire too. At 18 years old the general consensus is to just replace everything, but I went for the crossover cable first since it had a hot connection and seems to be a common issue on these cummins trucks for whatever reason. All it does is connect both the drivers and passenger side battery together. Im sure I could have just replaced the terminal on that one side with a military style one and it would have been fine. Atleast I narrowed down where the issue was. It actually wasnt until a couple weeks ago that I noticed that particular terminal was as hot as it was.
You'd have to have a lot of corrosion for it to be the wire too--unless if it was break due to flexing, in which case replacing would be best, as the rest of the wire is likely in similar shape.
Lopping off the terminals and crimping on new ends is very tempting, however I believe you would need to clean the copper up before crimping--otherwise you would still have copper oxide hurting connectivity. I've never tried to crimp onto old copper; it just seems like a bad idea all around. Not sure what to clean with (baking soda to clean up battery acid does seem to leave behind some very clean copper when I've done this); but you'd want to do that.
I just want to make sure you are cleaning the flat surfaces of the crimp terminals, not the hole. The hole doesn't carry the current--the current flows from the lead(?) battery terminal clamp into the flat surface of the crimp terminal. Some amount of current can flow through the bolt and then back down to the other side of the crimp terminal. But all the current is carried along on the clamped surfaces--if it's not an interference fit, then it won't carry current.
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Well the headlights sure seem a lot brighter with two good batteries lol. Didnt even need the brights on the way home like I usually do
